Instead of giving exams at the end of the course, make the courses project based. Most cmps students at my university only memorize information (and even memorize code) just to get a grade, but if instead they had to present a project at the end of the semester they would learn much more and have more experience

This. You learn much more by actually solving a complex problem compared to working on exercises which span 50 lines of code at most. My first programming course was like that. Four complex but not too difficult projects. We still had a final exam that was practically coding on paper but after those projects I didn't find it too difficult. We had to get a certain amount of points from the exam but that was because the lecturer did not have any guarantee that we actually worked on those projects. Anyway who didn't work on his project had probably zero chance of passing the exam. In my opinion good system.